Nam neque sic illam solido de marmore tecta Molitur leges, queis fortunata juventus Pareat, ac pace imperium tutetur et armis."* The internal states of mind, then, which form the class next to be considered by us, present to our inquiry no narrow or uninteresting field. We are to find in these again every thing, though in fainter colours, which delighted and interested us in the former class; while we are, at the same time, to discover, an abundant source of feelings still more delightful and sublime in themselves, and still more interesting to our analysis. We are no longer mere sensitive beings, that gaze upon the universe, and feel pain or pleasure as a few of its elementary particles touch our nerves. We are the discoverers of laws, which every element of the universe obeys,-the tracers of events of ages that are past, -the calculators and prophets of events, that are not to occur till generation after generation of the prophetic calculators that succeed us shall themselves have passed away;-and, while we are thus able to discover the innumerable relations of created things, we are, at the same time, by the medium of these internal states of our own mind, the discoverers also of that Infinite Being, who framed every thing which it is our glory to be capable merely of observing, and who, without acting directly on any of our organs of sense, is yet present to our intellect with as bright a reality of perception, as the suns and planets which he has formed are present to our corporeal vision. D. Heinsius. De Contemptu Mortis, Lib. i. The species of philosophical inquiry, which our internal affections of mind admit, is exactly the same as that which our external affections admit; that is to say, we are in our inquiry, to consider the circumstances in which they arise, and the circumstances which follow them, with the relations which they appear to us mutually to bear to our external feelings, and to each other, and nothing more. It is as little possible for us, independently of experience, to discover a priori, any reason that one state of mind should be followed directly by another state of mind, as, in the case of our external feelings, to discover any reason, that the presence of light should be followed by that particular mental state which constitutes the sensation of colour, not by that which constitutes the perception of the song of a nightingale, or the fragrance of a violet,-or that those external causes should be followed by their peculiar sensations, rather than by the perception of colour. It is equally vain for us to think of discovering any reason, in the nature of the mind itself, which could have enabled us to predict, without actual experience, or, at least, without analogy of other similar instances, any of the mere intellectual changes of state, that the sight of an object, which we have seen before in other circumstances, should recal, by instant spontaneous suggestion, those other circumstances which exist no longer;that in meeting, in the most distant country, a native of our own land, it should be in our own power, by a single word to annihilate, as it were, for the moment, all the seas and mountains between him and his home ;-or, in the depth of the most gloomy dungeon, where its wretched tenant, who has been its tenant for half a life, sees, and scarcely sees, the few faint rays that serve but to speak of a sunshine, which he is not to enjoy, and which they deprive him of the comfort of forgetting, and to render visible to his very eyes that wretchedness which he feels at his heart,-that even this creature of misery,-whom no one in the world perhaps remembers but the single being, whose regular presence, at the hour at which he gives him, day by day, the means of adding to his life another year of wretchedness like the past, is scarcely felt as the presence of another living thing,-should yet, by the influence of a single thought, enter into the instant possession of a freedom beyond that which the mere destruction of his dungeon could give, -a freedom which restores him not merely to the liberty, but to the very years which he had lost,-to the woods, and the brook, and the fields of his boyish frolics, and to all the happy faces which were only as happy as his own. The innumerable examples of such successions of thought we know from experience, but from experience only. It is enough for us, however, to ascertain the simple fact, that the internal suggestions of thought after thought, without the recurrence of any external object does take place, as truly as sensation itself, when external objects recur,to observe the general circumstances relating to the suggestion,-and to arrange the principle on which it seems to depend, as a principle of our intellectual constitution. While we attempt no more than this, we are certain at least that we are not attempting any thing which is beyond the sphere of human exertion. To attempt more, and to strive to discover, in any one of the series of our internal feelings, some reason which might have led us originally to predict its existence, or the existence of the other mental affections which succeed it, would be to hope to discover, what is not merely beyond our power even to divine, but what we should be incapable of knowing that we had divined, even though we should casually have succeeded in making the discovery. In the classification of our internal feelings, as in every classification, and, indeed, in every thing, intellectual or moral, which can exercise us, it is evident, that we may err in two ways, by excess or deficiency. We may multiply divisions without necessity, or we may labour in vain to force into one division individual diversities, which cannot, by any labour, be made to correspond. The golden mean, of which moralists speak, is as important in science, as in our practical views of happiness; and the habit of this cautious speculative moderation, is, probably, of as difficult attainment in the one, as the habitual contentment which is necessary to the enjoyment of the other. When we think of the infinite variety of the physical objects around us, and of the small number of classes in which they are at present arranged, it would seem to us, if we were ignorant of the history of philosophy, that the regular progress of classification must have been to simplify, more and more, the general circumstances of agreement, on which arrangement depends; that, in this progressive simplification, millions of diversities must have been originally reduced to thousands,-these, afterwards, to hun dreds, and these again, successively, to divisions still more minute. But, the truth is, that this simplicity of division is far from being so progressive in the arrangement even of external things. The first steps of classification must, indeed, uniformly be, to reduce the great multitude of obvious diversities to some less extensive tribes. But the mere guess-work of hypothesis soon comes in to supply the place of laborious observation or experiment, and of that slow and accurate reasoning on observations and experiments, which, to minds of very rapid imagination, is perhaps, a labour as wearisome, as, in the long observation itself, to watch for hours, with an eye fixed like the telescope through which it gazes, one constant point of the heavens, or to minister to the furnace, and hang over it in painful expectance of the transmutations which it tardily presents. By the unlimited power of an hypothesis, we in a moment range together, under one general name, myriads of diversities the most obstinately discordant; as if the mere giving of a name could of itself alter the qualities of things, making similar what was dissimilar before, like words of magic, that convert any thing into any thing. When the hypothesis is proved to be false, the temporary magic of the spell is of course dissolved; and all the original diversities appear again, to be ranged once more in a wider variety of classes. Even where, without any such guess-work of hypothetical resemblance, divisions and arrangements have been formed on the justest principles, according to the qualities of objects known at the time, some new observation, or new experiment, is continually shewing differences of composition or of general qualities, where none were conceived before; and the same philosophy is thus, at the same moment, employed in uniting and disuniting,-in reducing many objects to a few, and separating a few into many,-as the same electric power, at the moment in which it is attracting objects nearer to it, repels others which were almost in contiguity, and often brings the same object close to it, only to throw it off the next moment to a greater distance. While a nicer artificial analysis, or more accurate observation, is detecting unsuspected resemblances, and, still more frequently, unsuspected diversities, there is hence no fixed point nor regular advance, but a sort of ebb and flow of wider and narrower divisions and subdivisions; and the classes of an intervening age may be fewer than the classes both of the age which preceded it, and of that which comes after it. For a very striking example of this alternation, I may refer to the history of that science, which is to matter what our intellectual analysis is to mind. The elements of bodies have been more and fewer successively, varying with the analyses of almost every distinguished chemist; far from having fewer principles of bodies, as chemistry advances, how many more elements have we now than in the days of Aristotle! There can be no question, that when man first looked around him with a philosophic eye, and saw, in the sublime rudeness of nature, something more than objects of savage rapacity, or still more savage indifference, he must have conceived the varieties of bodies to be innumerable; and could as little have thought of comprehending them all under a few simple names, as of comprehending the whole earth itself within his narrow grasp. In a short time, however, this narrow grasp, if I may venture so to express myself, did strive to comprehend the whole earth; and soon after man had made the first great advance in science, of wondering at the infinity of things in which he was lost, we had sages, such as Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus, who were forming every thing of a single principle,-water, or air, or fire. The four elements, which afterwards reigned so long in the schools of physics, gave place to a single principle with the alchemists; or to three principles,-salt, sulphur, and mercury, with chemists less bold in conjecture. These, again, were soon multiplied by observers of still nicer discrimination; and modern chemistry, while it has shewn some bodies, which we regarded as different, to be composed of the same elements, has, at the same time, shewn, that what we regarded as elements, are themselves compounds of elements which we knew not before. To him who looks back on the history of our own science, the analytic science of mind, which, as I have already said, may almost be regarded, in its most important aspects, as a sort of intellectual chemistry,-there will appear the same alternate widening and narrowing of classification. The mental phenomena are, in one age or country, of many classes; in a succeeding age, or in a different country, they are of fewer; and again, after the lapse of another age, or the passage of a river or a mountain, they are of many more. In our own island, after the decay of scholastic metaphysics, from Hobbes to Hume,—if I may use these names, as dates |